Waiting for the fallout after huge shift in J&K

Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi are two Prime Ministers who could have made a positive contribution towards breaking the Kashmir stalemate. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s ultra-patriotic militants would like to believe that when British rule ended on August 15, 1947, the entirety of Britain’s Indian empire — the Akhand Bharat of legend and lore — devolved on a mythic Hindu nation. Neither Hari Singh nor Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, whom he hated but was forced to appoint “prime minister” under pressure from Jawaharlal Nehru, ever contemplated full integration in the sense of the position that states like Madhya Pradesh or Karnataka enjoy in India. As Nar Bahadur Bhandari, Sikkim’s first democratically elected chief minister, had famously put it when faced with the prospect of an influx of settlers from Darjeeling: “We have merged, but will not be submerged.” There is the additional threat in Kashmir to “Kashmiriyat”, the cultural concept which is said to be devoid of the fanaticism of Islamic orthodoxy. Most Kashmiri Muslims will agree with Sheikh Abdullah’s grandson, former chief minister Omar Abdullah, that the changes amount to “a total betrayal of the trust that the people of Jammu and Kashmir had reposed in India when the state acceded to it in 1947”.